[Noisebridge-discuss] Can Someone Help Me with My MBR?

Tue Jan 17 13:01:01 UTC 2012

I have a related boot loader / fucked partition table problem with my MacBook Pro, for which I believe I have finally exhausted most sensible options. In this case, there's some wackiness happening with either the gpt  or mbr table (they are properly sync'd), and/or remnants of a previous grub install, such that booting from USB Linux distros doesn't even slightly work, failing with "unrecognized filesystem" or "no such partition", and failing any attempt to edit grub options from the grub rescue prompt (same stupid errors).

Since my boot problem is likely from grub attempting to auto-detect non-existent partitions on the hard drive, even when booting from USB, I've decided that the next thing I might try is to yank the hard drive out, then boot with a live distro, then plug the hard drive in on USB and fix it from there (install/image something, chroot and reinstall/uninstall grub, whatever)... or maybe just fix it from another system.

Pulling the drive to perform a repair is probably easier done on *any machine* that's *not a Mac* than on my stupid unibody MBP, so you might want to try something similar before considering wiping the drive. 

- Brink

(But hey, I have a 6.5hr plane ride from NY to CA tomorrow... Do you guys think disassembling a MacBook at 35,000ft is likely to be considered "terrorist activity"? =P)

On Jan 16, 2012, at 11:33 PM, Christina Olson <daravinne at gmail.com> wrote:

> I dunno if this will help but i have a win7 professional x64 installer
> usb key, and could probably scare up an actual DVD of the same (if
> your system is 32 bit this will probably not help, however).  It
> sounds to me like the factory reset is being pulled off the disk
> recovery partition (stop me if you've heard this one before) and since
> that's not affecting the actual partition tables it's not going to do
> a damn thing to the mbr.  if you want to fix the mbr the blunt-force
> way, you wipe the disk and reinstall from scratch, which will also
> hose the recovery partition and your settings etc etc firey death.
> that's kind of your only option if fixing the mbr from the install
> media doesn't work.
> 
> i will be at the space thursday evening, for 5mof, but if you'd like
> me to take a look at it i can spare a couple minutes; alternatively i
> could probably swing by wednesday evening or something and meet with
> you.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 8:16 PM, Chrysanthemum Hyphus <c at hyph.us> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> Thank you both for responding to me!
>> 
>> Unfortunately, booting from any other device just doesn't work, no matter
>> how I set the BIOS. I made a repair disk myself from this installation, from
>> which I tried booting. I tried downloading, and booting from a generic
>> Windows 7 repair disk image which I burned to CD on my Mac. I tried booting
>> from a CD and then a USB flash drive containing Fedora.
>> 
>> Both the DVD drive and the flash drive are recognized by the BIOS, and I set
>> both of them to boot before the hard drive (and these settings are preserved
>> across power-downs), and it just keeps coming back to me with wanting a
>> Windows 7 installation disk, which I don't have, of course, because Windows
>> 7 came pre-installed.
>> 
>> The built-in system restore (provided in lieu of an installation disk)
>> system's OS repair option restored WIndows itself but not the MBR. A full
>> restore, which would restore it to factory condition, can't fix this either,
>> according to Samsung. The pisser is that it says it's loading Windows when
>> it starts up, but there's no way to get to a recovery console. The only
>> solution they could offer me is for me to send it off for two weeks for
>> service, which really sucks in three different ways.
>> 
>> I have virtually all of my data backed up, but I'm looking at many hours of
>> downloading, installing, and configuring all the programs I've installed,
>> not to mention configuring WIndows itself. I would wipe the drive right now,
>> though, if it would help, but since I'm told it won't, I'd rather not lose
>> everything for nothing.
>> 
>> So it appears that either I need a full installation disk to do a repair, or
>> I need to plug the hard drive into another computer (that can accept a
>> second notebook hard drive) as a secondary drive and fix it from a working
>> system. At least these options would preserve my programs and configuration.
>> If I send it back to Samsung, it will surely be wiped, for which I would
>> have paid and waited for, so I really hope someone can help me out with
>> this, because I've tried everything I can think of.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> --Chrysanthemum
>> 
>> Nations are never conscious of all the riches they possess in the matter of
>> knaves.
>> --Victor Hugo, Napoleon the Little
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:14 PM, maestro <maestro415 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> # i have a 7ultimate repair disc i made in 7ultimate....
>>> # it is NOT the full OS but may do the trick....
>>> # i will be @ the space tues probably sometime before 3....
>>> # you may make a backup off my 7 partition if u like as well....
>>> # also there is info in the arctic wind(linux penguins) that veteran
>>> unix/linux users/developers have been able to use LinuxPuppy to even  fix
>>> partition shit in windows though I HAVE NOT done this....
>>> # you may be able to find this knowledge online or in linuxdev mags....
>>> # i have puppy disc with me but it runs in your ram so....
>>> 
>>> end comments
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Chrysanthemum Hyphus <c at hyph.us> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hello Noisebridge,
>>>> 
>>>> I corrupted my master boot record on my Windows 7 laptop while trying to
>>>> uninstall Wubi before doing a proper install of Linux, so it will not boot
>>>> at all. I would like to non-destructively repartition my hard drive to
>>>> create a new partition for Linux, which has not been done yet. I have all of
>>>> my data on a separate partition from Windows, but I'm hoping to keep the
>>>> programs and any configuration data on the Windows OS partition intact.
>>>> 
>>>> Does anyone have a bootable flash drive or bootable DVD with a utility to
>>>> at least fix the MBR without disturbing any of the data that currently
>>>> exists on it? A program that will do a nondestructive partition would be
>>>> awesome. If so, let me know when I could meet you at Noisebridge, perhaps
>>>> this Thursday afternoon if not sooner.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> --Chrysanthemum
>>>> 
>>>> Nations are never conscious of all the riches they possess in the matter
>>>> of knaves.
>>>> --Victor Hugo, Napoleon the Little
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>>>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>>>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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